Emma Sachse (born Emma Claus, 8 May 1887 – 24 January 1965) was a German activist for feminist and other political causes. She was a member of the Thuringia parliament ("Landtag") and later became chair of the Workers' Welfare Organisation ("Arbeiterwohlfahrt" / AWO) in Thuringia.
Life
Emma Claus was born in Göttingen, the sixth of her parents' nine recorded children. Her father was an unskilled rural labourer and the family was poor. The family atmosphere in which she grew up was strongly Christian, and she herself excelled during her six years at junior school, but it was not financially possible for her to progress to secondary school. On leaving school she worked for neighbouring families as a child care giver and helped with her own family's "home work" which involved boxing up and weighing packets of washing powder for the local soap factory. When she was 15 she moved to Leipzig and entered domestic service, developing an acute awareness of the great disparity between the life opportunities of the poor and those of the ruling classes.
In 1905 she met her future husband, a print worker from Altenburg. He introduced her to the burgeoning labour movement. Emma Claus married in 1909 and took the name Emma Sachse: in 1913 the Sachse family relocated to Altenburg as a result of her husband accepting a job with the Altenburger Volkszeitung newspaper. While living as a housewife and young mother she was able to progress her political education through careful reading of the Leipziger Volkszeitung, a socialist daily paper, and of the women's magazine Die Gleichheit ("Equality"), and became increasingly committed to socialist politics and the extension of women's rights, trusted by SPD party comrades in Saxe-Altenburg, at that stage still a relatively autonomous territory within Germany.
In 1914 she joined the Social Democratic Party. Her husband had already become a member two years earlier. By the time the war ended, in 1918, Emma Sachse had acquired Thuringian citizenship, and shortly afterwards she attended an SPD national women's conference in Kassel, as a delegate representing the socialist women of East Thuringia. This was the start of an involvement in the SPD at a national level which lasted till 1933. She sat on various party committees, participated in party conferences, and served between 1927 and 1933 on the party's national executive committee.
Political activities
Between 1920 and 1933, Emma Sachse sat as a member of the Thüringian regional parliament ("Landtag") without interruption. There were seven women in the assembly during this period, but only two of these - Emma Sachse and Marie Schulz, who was a member between 1920 and 1928 - had such lengthy periods of continuous service. After 1932 Emma Sachse was the only female member of the Landtag serving on the budget committee, the committee for legislation and administration, the committee for legislation and social policy, and as a deputy chair of the investigation committee. She also stood for election to the national parliament (Reichstag) in 1928 and 1932, but without success.
In her political work, Sachse concentrated on helping the poor. She involved herself in setting up women's groups in the SPD and on local committees for the Workers' Welfare ("Arbeiterwohlfahrt"/ AWO) movement. In 1929/30 she took on chairmanship if the Worker's Welfare group for Greater Thüringia and made it her objective to ease the financial burdens on working families. She was particularly concerned with creating life chances for young people and women, and emergency relief in the rural parts of Thüringia. She saw her role as building the AWO by building support for it inside the SPD, and using her elected official roles to promote it as a way for the state to fulfill its welfare responsibilities to make life less difficult for the disadvantaged.
Towards the end of the 1920s the clear drift towards right-wing race-based populism became hard to ignore. Emma Sachse reacted by firmly positioning herself in opposition to antisemitism. During the increasingly frenzied final years of the Weimar period she spoke out against national rearmament and the dismantling of social welfare structures. At the AWO regional conference of 1930 the movement adopted a resolution protesting in the sharpest terms against the threatened institutional destruction in the areas of social and welfare policy which the fascist structures proposed for Thüringia incorporated.